by Ned Rorem
Auric, Milhaud, Poulenc, Tailleferre, Honegger,
J’ai mis votre bouquet dans l’eau d’un même vase.
(I eventually knew Auric by far the best, but adored Poulenc the most, though Honegger would be my professor when I had a Fulbright, and Milhaud and Tailleferre were stable acquaintances.) José explained that Poulenc and Auric were intimate (platonic) friends, that the former never showed his music to anyone before getting the latter’s approval. Auric, the most cultured, the most “brainy” of any Frenchman I would ever meet (though he knew no word of any foreign language), was, by that token, a bit stymied creatively. True, he was France’s most experienced composer of film scores, but when it came to concert music—to “serious” ballets—he struck me as, maybe, pompous. Out of fear of making mistakes, Auric ended up empty-handed, while Poulenc, less intellectual, rushed in where angels, etc. A true artist errs and then rues; a less true artist refrains and then weeps. The difference between remorse and regret. I would liken Auric and Poulenc to Bill Flanagan and me, if it didn’t imply that Bill was less of a “true” artist. Anyhow, José went on to explain that Poulenc liked rough trade, and that he had a permanent affair with his married chauffeur, Raymond. I still felt that José, after what had just transpired, wasn’t quite as … well, on the inside as he let on.
Whereupon Henri Sauguet passed by, with two others, and paused to chat. Learning that I was an American composer and knew Virgil (for Sauguet was Virgil’s dearest musical friend in France), he invited José to bring me around and intone my tunes, any time will do. Then off they went to dine around the corner at La Méditerranée.
Let’s us go there too, said José, it’s the restaurant of the Left Bank. So we did. La Méditerranée, in place de l’Odéon just across from the Théâtre de France, was indeed the place, expensive and non-American. Again I felt, vis-à-vis José, that his bark was bigger than his bite as we sat at our little table like poor relations, while way over there, laughing, were Sauguet with his friends and other witty monsters. But José told me about them all, and I told him that yes, I did know Sauguet’s music, especially the lean, enchanting La voyante which Danny Pink-ham had played for me long ago.
Brooding today over “La reine de coeur” from 1960, perhaps the last song Poulenc ever wrote, I hear how much less perfect it sounds than, say, “Une ruine coquille vide” from twenty-three years earlier, according to how I teach my children (quit the key in the midsection so that the return to familiarity will “tell”). Yet who am I to criticize the maître from whom I learned all? In its two pages “La reine” may move nowhere, yet it’s moving as hell. Poulenc here used the same air as in the contemporaneous Clarinet Sonata, and the same harmony as he’d been using all his life (“all so quite new,” as Cummings would say), yet the recurring tone B, leaned upon, with a major seventh dangling below, rends the heart. I imagine it orchestrated, with that rending B sounded far off on a French horn, among the strings in the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées perhaps, perhaps in 1922 before the song, or I, existed, and intoned by a horn player with dark gray hair, melancholy, with firm torso, monolingual, and uncircumcised.
(I have been given a quadrillion dollars. Bring me that horn player for whom I lust. No? Then why am I rich? But wait—here he comes—you have brought him. Why does he look over my shoulder at the beauty behind me? Oh, why am I rich? That beauty is me as I once was. You are banished.)
As a maître Poulenc was dangerous, a converse dybbuk. Using no mask, he sang through his own lips with other men’s voices. His very lack of originality became the unabashed signature of unique glories. The signature cannot be passed on.
• • •
Friday then, José and I dutifully returned to rue de Médicis. This would be the first of a dozen visits over the years whereat Poulenc and I, with José as cheering section, played for each other. Poulenc’s interest in me was, of course, my interest in him: like all the French, he knew nothing of the United States (although he’d been there twice on tour with Bernac), so was impressed that a young American could be so well-versed in his music. He tutoyéd me straightaway (I said vous to him until the end), and we talked not just about music but about “men.” His taste in the former was biased toward everything French, except Fauré for whom he had an allergy, perhaps because he was so clearly influenced by him (an instance of imitator improving on original); his taste in the latter was toward sergents-de-ville, lower-class types with handlebar mustaches, long winter underwear, and a slight pot belly. The exuberance of such types shines through virtually all of his oeuvre, not just the Chansons villageoises and the Mamelles de Tirésias but in the jollity of his grave religious works. His beau idéal was our Governor Thomas E. Dewey. “How can you Americans not have voted him for president? Il est divin.”
At the end of this first visit he left the building with us. We walked him to the métro (he never used taxis, only his chauffeured car or the subway), passing the little square which now bears his name—appropriately next to a police station—down the rue de Tournon to Saint-Sulpice. Directly across from his doorway, skirting the garden with the high iron fence, were two pissotières about twenty yards from each other. Poulenc told us he often peered from his window at the comings and going between these two tosses—or teacups, as the slang has it. He even frequented them himself. Why, just yesterday morning he went into the first tasse, where he observed this garçon qui bandait. Five hours later he stopped by again and there was the same garçon qui bandait. When we arrived at the subway he bid us goodbye, calling José mon cher grand and calling me mon petit, all this with the nasal twang so characteristic of both his voice and his music, his upper-crust elegance (he was born rich: Rhône-Poulenc pharmaceutical products), his barnacled nose, his ugly beauty.
José explained what Poulenc had been talking about, the speech having been too rapid and colloquial for me. Public urinals, called pissoirs or pissotières, were for cruising, as I would eventually learn only too well. There was one on nearly every block in Paris, typically shaped like a Tiffany lampshade or tea cozy, with space for three human males whose six legs—like a gigantic insect—were visible from outside. These venerable art-nouveau institutions, which Djuna Barnes called “confessionals,” were abolished as eyesores in the late 1950s by de Gaulle’s wife. As for the garçon qui bandait, or “guy with a hard-on,” how did you translate this verb? Bander, literally “to tighten,” in semiargot meant “to get an erection,” but could apply to women too, as in English a woman can be said “to get horny.” José told me, with solemn pride, that Gide had legitimized the word by using it in Thésée. Such was my French lesson for the day.
Between the two appointments with Poulenc came an occurrence that changed my life. (Well, yes, any occurrence, even daily ones of buying the Times or brushing the teeth, changes our life, but not necessarily geographically.) Did I mention that the Reine Blanche is a quite small establishment—a narrow twenty-five-foot-long bar with a dozen stools on the right as you enter, and on the left a four-foot-wide walkway—made to look bigger with mirrors? There at midnight on 6 July, while chatting with Alvin Ross as we swigged Pernod, I leaned toward the reflecting wall and kissed my image on the mouth. From behind me a voice in accented English said: “I could do it better than that.” I turned around to a coup de foudre.
Guy Ferrand, twenty-nine, stocky with a salt-and-pepper crew-cut and a hint of five-o’clock shadow, bad teeth (like everyone in France), and keen oriental eyes, immediately struck me as very sexy. A Bordelais by birth, he now lived in Fez, Morocco, where, as a professional doctor he headed a plan at the Hôpital Cocard to inoculate indigenous tribes and rid the land of malaria. For the moment he was on vacation, so why shouldn’t he come home with me? I hesitated to bring him upstairs. Instead, in the dark before dawn, we made love on the mildewing hallway stairs, and next day motored to Chartres in his Citroën 4-chevaux. The cathedral seemed then, as on every subsequent visit, dingy and cheerless. But the apricot sherbet in the medieval café en face, a
ccompanied by Guy’s descriptions of North Africa’s lunar landscape, remains indelible, as does his singing of raunchy French folk songs as we drove back to Paris at dusk through the flat and prosperous be-poplared countryside.
Norris did see The Blue Angel—we all did. We also saw (heard) Tristan with Flagstad who filled the Salle Garnier with tragic gold.
One night the Reine Blanche was raided. Within thirty seconds, like a black hemorrhage, the place filled with police—les flics—who, without explanation, herded every client, including me, into a waiting paddy wagon as the consommateurs from adjoining café terraces gathered to jeer. At the préfecture on the Quai des Orfévres (site of so many Simenon novels) we were ushered into a huge room where hundreds of customers from other bars were already waiting. There we spent the night, to be released, again without explanation, around 6 a.m., into a cloudless dawn. Harp Street being a stone’s throw across the Saint-Michel Bridge, I got home in five minutes only to find that the Rose Rouge had also been raided the night before. At least I learned a new word: rafle (noun, fern.), police roundup or raid.
Ubiquitous in the quarter was the staggeringly beautiful Juliette Gréco. Nothing like her had ever been seen before. She came to represent the very 7 icon of existentialism when she sang, in a throaty baritone, the world-weary chansons of Kosma and Quéneau in a boîte called the Tabou. Straight bangs surmounting worried black eyes, long hair in a jet stream down her back, long limbed and svelte in her boy’s pants and a rapid stride. Usually she was alone, though occasionally in the company of the equally stunning, equally tall, Annabel. Like animals or vines the two women walked intertwined, laughing, carefully ignorant of their staring fans for whom they legitimized the lure of Sapphism. Gréco was a marvel of the natural world, until she got her Jewish nose gentilized (by Dr. Claoué, father of composer Yves Claoué), became famous, changed her slacks to pink chiffon skirts, appeared as a fury in Cocteau’s Orphée, and married various semi-celebrated males. (Annabel too got married … to Bernard Buffet.)
I saw Guy daily, introduced him to everyone, went to museums and concerts (but not to bars since drinking to him was anathema), and learned more and more French. He turned out to be an avid music lover, even had a piano in what he called his “very agreeable house” in Fez. Head cocked, as always, to one side, he asked that terrible question, to which I gave the only possible reply:
“How would you describe your own music?”
“By playing it.”
Whereupon he invited me to Morocco.
José took me to Henri Sauguet’s in the rue Truffaut. Sauguet, aged forty-nine, had been a protégé of Satie’s and Koechlin’s; his calm, economical, ultramelodic, and rather featureless music appealed to me hugely. His personal homeliness—big nose, weak chin, pop eyes, and pince-nez—worked to his advantage as a wit, as when he imitated Landowska lecturing on the harpsichord, or Raffaello de Banfield discussing high art with a duchess. He was the wittiest man in France, quick and savage; but like many satirists he was the soul of kindness. On that Monday of 18 July were also present Jacques Dupont, Sauguet’s lover for the past twenty years, aged thirty-eight, painter and portraitist of the quality of Bérard, and whom I found seductive with his laughing eyes, old-fashioned mustache, and habit of chain-smoking; and another composer, Jacques Leguerney, a somewhat tamer version of Sauguet in whose shadow he perennially flourished. I showed off for them, since José H. was “launching” me as a mascot in society, and they were warm. When I mentioned Guy Ferrand they wondered could this be the same Guy Ferrand who was the ami of Reynaldo Hahn, that is, of Proust’s lover?
They talked continually of Jean Cocteau, since Sauguet had been once launched by that poet as I was being now launched. As usually happens when an artist’s best days are behind him, Cocteau was currently more famous than ever merely for being Cocteau. Surely to Americans he was, after Gide and Jean Gabin, France’s chief export. In 1949 Cocteau decided that fame was too much for him, and withdrew. Everywhere were signs of his withdrawal—of Cocteau in the act of not-being-famous. Newsreels showed him walking away from the camera, then turning to wave farewell. Americans (i.e., Paul Goodman, Norris Embry) had memorized his serious side, but in Paris his trashier and more beguiling side was omnipresent. He had been paid, said Sauguet, 500,000 francs to write this slogan for Lanvin: “Ladies, your legs are poems. Bind them in Lanvin hosiery.” And when Marlene Dietrich came through town, he introduced her from the stage: “Madame, your name begins with a caress and ends in a whiplash.”
From Paul Bowles, returned to Morocco, came this letter in red ink out of the blue:
British Post Office, Tanger, Maroc 8/vii/49
Dear Ned: A word to ask you what you’re doing, what you’re going to do, where you are, where you’re going to be, and when. I hope this will reach you and that your friends will forward it to wherever you are. Truman C. is here; Gore V. left the other day. Perhaps one of these days you will show up. I think you’d like it. I looked for you at the R.B. on Blvd. St. G. my last night. No sign, best, Paul
But where exactly is Morocco? I asked Shirley and Norris. It’s down under the Mediterranean, they said, just across from France. Do you think I should go? I asked. What else have you got to do? they answered.
On “22 juillet” Paul sent another note, black ink on powder blue:
Your letter came this afternoon, and it was exciting news to hear that you might be coming so soon. Of course, this is the best time of year in Tangier. It is incredibly beautiful now. We are living at the Farhar, which is on the mountain overlooking the sea, Spain, and the Riffian Mountains. The house is being built, but is by no means finished. It could in a pinch be lived in, but I don’t think it would be comfortable for you. Perhaps in another week our maid will be out of the hospital and could cook for you. I may of course be completely crazy in thinking you expected to live there in any case, but actually you could in the salon (about 6 feet by 4) and the maid would prepare your food. The rest of the house is full of Arab workmen. Let me hear from you about all this. The hotel where we are is well out of town. Be sure and notify me in advance if you come so I can meet the boat. It’s hellishly confusing to arrive alone and not be met.
best Paul
What made him believe I was coming to Tangier, let alone to lodge in his unfinished house, when my plans were clearly to go to Fez, 150 miles southeast, to spend the rest of the summer? I had decided to accept Guy’s invitation. He had now gone to Bordeaux to visit a brother, and hoped I would meet him in Avignon where we would begin the trek southward. I would need a typhus shot, he said, adding that he loved and missed me. (I miss you = tu me manques, i.e., you are lacking to me, one of those convolutions an American needs to get the hang of.) Was I getting into hot water? I scarcely knew him—though what does “to know” mean? It has to do with intensity, not longevity. I knew Guy during the last fortnight more deliciously than others I’d seen daily for years. Still. Opposites attract, but this very opposition may become the source of bickering, then of divorce. Unless, like Jack Spratt and wife, you lick the platter clean.
Meanwhile, I was carousing as much as ever, and not working, unless work is the ingestion of a novel culture, and trying, like the leopard, to change your spots, just at the moment when those very spots are your trump card.
Comte Anne de Biéville sought to beguile me with pornography, mainly Cocteau’s equivocal drawings for his own Livre blanc. Pornography is fun or dull according to an artist’s skill, but when concocted to excite, it works only if the dramatis personae are your type. If one character, although physically a turn-on, behaves as you feel he should not (behaving passively instead of actively, for example), the intended bonfire acts like a wet balloon. Still, how healthy, how natural! What Great Master did not produce his percentage of the genre? (Webster’s: Gk pornographos, adj., writing of harlots, fr. porné harlot + graphien to write.) Maybe all writers are whores. Witness the “dirty” sketches, gay and straight, of Jacques Callot, of Goya, of the Renaissan
ce glories in the secret drawers of the Naples museum and of the Vatican, of Picasso and Balthus and Paul Cadmus. Music cannot be proved to be pornographic, though Shostakovich did his best to subvert the Wagnerian convention of Love-as-Violins, by using the belching thrusts of drum and trombone to represent a wedding night.
You cannot imagine the odoriferous nostalgia evoked as I sit at the dining room table with a magnifying glass, curved over a great map of the city retracing the promenades of nearly a half-century ago, streets whose names have changed, cafés and hotels long since demolished, boarding again with José (now dead) the Bâteau-Mouche, that little riverboat, at nine o’clock (the summer sun of northern France does not set until midnight), and dining with two carafes of white wine while the scenery of the Seine changes kaleidoscopically as you glide the lazy kilometers between the Pont de Tolbiac and the Pont d’Issy, and being young and in love and in Paris. I took the same Bâteau-Mouche trip with Guy (now vanished), and the limits of being-in-love seemed boundless. Eternal love lasts as long as it lasts: sometimes, as the clock ticks, an hour or two, sometimes a lifetime.
We bought a ton of music at Durand’s (now also vanished) in the place de la Madeleine—Messiaen, Ravel, Debussy, all their complete works in those memorable editions with the composers’ monograms on creamy vellum. Music publications were still artifacts.
1949 saw the agonized climax of French culture; we got there before the rot. The Great were still there; some of them, like Poulenc and Messiaen and Genet, had their grandest works ahead, while others, like Honegger and Sartre and Gide were already in a twilight. No one would replace them, but this perspective was as yet unfocused.
France knows all about music except how to listen to it. Italians sing with their singers, Germans sit with head in hands, while the French attend nicely and whisper, “Comme c’est beau.” Not an auditory breed, they are culinary, visual, excel at dress design and pictures and literature. No French composer has been prophet in his land, and no French performer can stand apart from his sacred repertory enough to interpret it with necessary scope. Whether they could govern another country as remote from their rational Catholicism as North Africa with its violent Islamism would be soon determined.
